I wonder if in light of the recent difficulties with upgradeing of php and mysql if it would be handy to have a feature available via the Site Manager that you could easily display a page that says "Site Under Maintnance" with maybe a time frame of when it would be back up for all request to the domain.

I would think the best case of this would the ability to upload a page to the main directory called site_maint.html then to be able to go to the Site Manager and click the option to display the page. This would then modify the httpd.conf file to redirect all request to that page except for a request for the IP number that the user was comeing from when they enabled the feature.

A person could then do maintnance on the site and check to make sure everything was working as it should since they would still be able to access the site as long as they where comeing requesting from the same IP.

It may be that a link in Site Manager where you enable this would need to be used that opened the site in a new window would be needed to assure this would work. I'm not real sure of the technicalities or if it really is feasible but seems there should be some way and it would be a nice add feature.

I guess you would need to put in some type of failsafe so that if a person logged out of Site Manager before they would be asked if they wanted to re-enable access to the site. Maybe even as a double back have an email auto send to the main email address that says "Your site is in maintnance mode. Don't forget." and then when it is enabled an email sent "You site is now enabled". Just trying to think of backups. :)

I keep trying to think of the best place for this and maybe on the Site Apps page would be good since most users would use it when upgradeing Apps. Or maybe have a page within the Apps area called Upgrades. Not only would this feature be there but the upgrade Apps. That gets a bit complicated because you would then want the version you upgraded to to show up in the Databases or Development and the old one to be moved to this upgrade area.... hmmm maybe I am getting to complicated. :shock:

visible soul

02-04-2005, 01:55 PM

I like the idea wildjoker. :) It would be good to have this page to display when using the VDS backup utility. The #1 thing I do not like about the WH VDS backup utility is that the entire site is unavailable and no message like "Site Under Maintenance" is displayed. I vote for this feature. :D

-=DKC=-

SJP

02-04-2005, 10:01 PM

Aren't you able to customize handling of 404 errors (webpage not found)? If so then when the site would be unavailable you would arrange it so that this occurs.

SJP

wildjokerdesign

02-05-2005, 06:48 AM

Yes that is possible and I use a version of that on many of my sites. With some changes, like upgradeing php, the pages are still there but may not be displaying in the correct manner. If you in the process of updateing MYSQL if your pages that connect to the database may fail or return results you wouldn't want your viewers to see.